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Named for Her Grandmother, Mythily Opens in Williamsburg
Rasika Venkatesa turns her Tamil pop-up Mythily into a Williamsburg dining room at the end of September
There is a drink on the new menu at 129 Havemeyer Street called the Power Cut. It is a spiced black tea with fresh ginger juice and jaggery, and it contains no alcohol. The name points back to summer blackouts in India, when the power was cut to save electricity. The chef behind the menu told Eater the drink lands like a jolt, in a good way.
That chef is Rasika Venkatesa, and on Wednesday, September 30, she opens Mythily, her first restaurant of her own, in Williamsburg. It sits between South First and Grand Streets, a short walk from the crowded restaurant stretch of Grand Street. The name belongs to her grandmother.
From Chennai to Havemeyer Street
Venkatesa grew up in a Tamil Brahmin household in Chennai. She told Eater that her grandmother was a huge inspiration in her cooking life, and the restaurant is her way of saying so on the door.
The road from Chennai to Brooklyn ran through some serious kitchens. Time Out New York, which named her one of the city's Best Young Chefs in 2025, reports that she studied hotel management and hospitality at Manipal University in India. She then went to the French Laundry, Thomas Keller's restaurant in Yountville, California, where she started as a commis and worked up to chef de partie. From there she moved to Mourad, the Moroccan restaurant in San Francisco, which has since closed. Time Out described her as one of the youngest chefs de cuisine in the country during her time there.
In 2024 she competed on the 21st season of Top Chef. That May, Time Out reports, she launched Mythily as a pop-up. About six months in, according to Eater, it landed a four month residency at Fulgrances, the Greenpoint pop-up space that has since closed. The residency, and the Time Out honor that followed, gave the idea real momentum.
Somewhere along the way she made a decision that shapes everything on the new menu. After years in other kitchens, she wanted a menu that was entirely hers. She put it plainly to Eater. Mythily, she said, is what Indian food means to her "as a South Indian, as a Tamil girl, as an immigrant, as someone who's queer in a community that predominantly hasn't been super queer supportive before."
There's no one set way to represent a cuisine.
She told Time Out that last year, and the menu reads like proof. It is rooted in the cooking of Tamil Nadu, but it is not a museum piece.
A Menu That Moves
The menu is split into snacks, small plates, and big plates. Mains run from $30 to $50, Eater reports. A scallop crudo arrives with Concord grapes and puli inji, a pickled condiment of tamarind, ginger, and green chile, and it is finished with a granita of jaggery, ginger, and warm spices.
Vegetables get star treatment. A Caraflex cabbage is slow roasted with cumin, coriander, and turmeric, then peeled apart and rebuilt in layers with a sorrel and coconut chutney. It sits on green lentils and mushrooms. Elsewhere there is a chicken ballotine, tilefish with romanesco and a black currant kosho, and short ribs with plums, maitake mushrooms, and a bone marrow kozhumbu, a tamarind curry.
Dessert brings back a favorite from the Fulgrances days. It is a rasmalai tres leches, a sponge cake soaked in saffron and cardamom milk and topped with whipped white chocolate, pistachios, almonds, and orange zest. There is also a filter coffee soft serve with peanut and jaggery brittle.
The bar leans gentle. The drinks list favors nonalcoholic and low proof options built on cordials and spiced shochu. The Kho Kho, named for a game she played as a schoolgirl, pairs hibiscus shochu with rosebud syrup. Brooklyn beers and wines from around the world fill out the list. For a city that has started eating later and later, a dinner that ends clear headed is its own kind of luxury.
The Room After Dark
Mythily is small. The dining room seats 33, with nine more seats at the bar, in about 1,000 square feet. Venkatesa designed it with her business partner Varun Kandadi and Studio Purisic. She wanted it to carry the colors of Kanchipuram saris. So the palette runs to deep reds and dark greens, with wood, limewash, brass, Moroccan clay, and quartzite. A family friend, Aishwarya Ramanchandran, made an artwork for the room that shows a grandmother feeding her granddaughter.
Kandadi and Nicolas Chavotier are her partners in the business. The restaurant is a night place by design. Service runs Wednesday through Saturday from 5 to 10 p.m., and Sunday from 4 to 9 p.m. Reservations go through SevenRooms. The full rundown of the opening is in Eater's report on Mythily.
The evenings will tell the rest. A chef who trained at the French Laundry will be cooking the food of the house she grew up in, in a room colored like the saris of Kanchipuram.
After years in other kitchens, she wanted a menu that was entirely hers.
That is the whole story of Mythily in one line. The pop-up years are over. The grandmother's name is on the door.